Were Brutes that Badly Nerfed?

[twozerofoxtrot]

And larger target caps. Don't forget the target caps.

 

Honestly I think if the radius changes were reversed and all else kept the same Tankers would still keep their place because hitting more stuff at once is a kinda big deal. Certain sets may not be as strong but across the whole AT the performance would still be high.

 

I mean in reverse this is like Sentinels' biggest complaint.

Edited January 12, 2023 by twozerofoxtrot

[aethereal]

Yeah, I don't rant about it often because I don't get the impression that the HC staff is particularly interested in revisiting it as a design choice, but I think that it's been a big mistake to use differing target caps as an AT differentiation point.  It's too large a balance point, it's artificial and gamey, and it creates very awkward distinctions between ST and AoE performance.

 

If I were going to nerf Tanks, I'd keep the AoE area bonuses but drop them to normal target caps.  If I felt like this left them at a significant deficit of aggro management compared to Brutes (and I'm far from convinced that tanks pre-buff had any problems with aggro management), then I might allow a higher target cap on Taunt -- but not on damage-dealing powers.

 

(And similarly, I'd maybe give sentinels smaller AoEs, but normal caps for their AoEs).

 

But as I said, it doesn't feel like this is a point worth trying to argue about.

[Gobbledigook]

I would not be against reducing Tanker AoE. No one actually asked for it anyway i don't think.

 

The increase to the damage scalar was added because Tankers used to have Bruising that reduced target resists but they lost that because it wasn't good and gained a damage increase to compensate. They also need to be able to take on hard targets now and then and not be at a stand off. Every AT can clear trash easily anyway.

 

A Scrapper will take a hard target down far faster than a Tanker can. Tankers have better mitigation. That seems fair.

The Tanker getting the extra AoE is the cause of the disputes in my opinion.

 Brutes have an awkward middle ground. Too close to either of the other AT's and that upsets them and can cause imbalance. Too far and Brutes underperform.

 

I would also not be against Brutes getting a Fury buff increasing damage but being much more difficult to maintain. What reasons other than maybe players struggling to maintain Fury was given for the changes i don't know.  The ATO proc may become more valid. 

 

Maybe Brutes could do with a better niche than just middle ground though. 

[Nyghtmaire]

9 hours ago, Gobbledegook said:

I would also not be against Brutes getting a Fury buff increasing damage but being much more difficult to maintain. What reasons other than maybe players struggling to maintain Fury was given for the changes i don't know.  The ATO proc may become more valid. 

I like this direction. The approach may be in having Fury provide an additional effect at certain breakpoints, whether endurance reduction, regen increase, HP increase, debuff proc (maybe based on interaction with the secondary), -dam, etc. Basically something not directly tied to damage but emulates the essence of BRUTE GETTING ANGRY. A bit of a benefit to teaming but also useful when solo. 

[Grimm2]

The idea of a "Max Rage" button tied to the Brute inherent came to me as I read this thread. It'd be another button to press, but what if when a Brute is over 50% Rage, you could activate "Max Rage," forcing the Rage bar to the top for a short period. On expiration, the Brute gains the "Fatigued" condition, preventing Fury gain over 50% for the same period of time. 

 

A player could then have access to higher burst damage that could be used tactically, giggling at All That Fury, and average sustained damage is unaffected. A player could also ignore the button and play as it has been without penalty. 

 

*tilts hat* You all have a good day. 

[aethereal]

I think it's really tough to hit exactly the right sweet spot on Rage.  Make it a bit too hard to build and, it's a frustrating nerf for a class that already is marginal.  Make it a little too easy to build and then everyone is at 100 Rage all the time instead of 85 Rage all the time.

 

That's not to say that the current situation -- where the Rage meter goes instantly to 85 and then stops moving -- isn't bad.  It is bad.  But I think that people are overestimating how easy it would be to make the Rage meter fluctuate significantly.  Back when Brutes came out, we had a lot less overall power and more downtime.  In the current environment of pretty easy access to even high-end IOs and incarnates, cannonballing from mob to mob isn't a high-risk tactic that Brutes might thematically use, it's common play experience.  And remember the reason why we got the latest Rage buff -- because otherwise when you had two Brutes on a team they were essentially fighting over who got to build Rage.  I think it'd suck to be in a situation where you didn't want to team with other Brutes.

 

I don't think that players, empirically, like "shoot your wad then suffer a lockout period of lowered efficacy."  Look at how people wail and gnash their teeth over the lockouts in Savage Melee and Psi Melee.  Look at how categorically people reject crashing T9s, or the Rage crash.

[Grimm2]

2 hours ago, aethereal said:

I don't think that players, empirically, like "shoot your wad then suffer a lockout period of lowered efficacy."  Look at how people wail and gnash their teeth over the lockouts in Savage Melee and Psi Melee.  Look at how categorically people reject crashing T9s, or the Rage crash.

I agree. Like, Dominators as an AT are only accepted with no downtime to their inherent as a basic build goal. I think my idea only holds water if it is a Build-up-esqe boost to the Rage bar, like, 10 seconds, that could be used tactically to burst a spawn, boss, or problem mob. Then the cool down period would be equally short, and normal Rage rules would resume. 

 

It is a lipstick-on-a-pig solution. You could have the same idea with no lockout, but then I imagine it would have a longer cooldown and potentially forgettable. Though the original idea was meant to be ignoreable anyways since it changed nothing about how the brute plays, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

 

[Snarky]

5 hours ago, Grimm2 said:

The idea of a "Max Rage" button tied to the Brute inherent came to me as I read this thread. It'd be another button to press, but what if when a Brute is over 50% Rage, you could activate "Max Rage," forcing the Rage bar to the top for a short period. On expiration, the Brute gains the "Fatigued" condition, preventing Fury gain over 50% for the same period of time. 

 

A player could then have access to higher burst damage that could be used tactically, giggling at All That Fury, and average sustained damage is unaffected. A player could also ignore the button and play as it has been without penalty. 

 

*tilts hat* You all have a good day. 

It exists already.  The villain archetype power (for Brute) maxs rage.  But by the time you activate a power bitch be back down to normal cap

Edited January 12, 2023 by Snarky

[twozerofoxtrot]

9 hours ago, aethereal said:

Make it a little too easy to build and then everyone is at 100 Rage all the time instead of 85 Rage all the time.

 

85 is effectively 100 at this point. 

 

I think I've gotten over 95 Fury (not Rage) once ever since the changes to Fury went live and I haven't been able to replicate it since.

 

So making it *possible* to reach and hold the 100% cap should definitely be considered. Right now theres a soft ceiling to Fury and it's driving all the Brute players crazy.

[aethereal]

1 minute ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

85 is effectively 100 at this point. 

 

I think I've gotten over 95 Fury (not Rage) once ever since the changes to Fury went live and I haven't been able to replicate it since.

 

So making it *possible* to reach and hold the 100% cap should definitely be considered. Right now theres a soft ceiling to Fury and it's driving all the Brute players crazy.

Sorry about mixing up the words Fury and Rage.

 

I'm not sure that you really got the point of my post.  I am fully aware of how Fury works now -- as I said in the post you quoted, it goes to 85 and then basically never moves, up or down.

 

In an ideal world, Fury would fluctuate.  It shouldn't just feel like Brutes get an extra 170% damage enhancement, the end, as the entirety of the mechanic.  But I think it's genuinely hard to make a mechanic which fluctuates satisfyingly, that doesn't feel frustrating, in the current CoH environment.

[twozerofoxtrot]

20 minutes ago, aethereal said:

I'm not sure that you really got the point of my post.

 

Then let me convince you I did.

 

It's already easy to build to the cap. The cap just happens to be at 85 now.

 

It was pretty darned good before the changes. Really only suffered on single targets. Change it back to that. Maybe have it cap out at 85 against single targets.

[Luminara]

17 minutes ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

It's already easy to build to the cap. The cap just happens to be at 85 now.

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

Quick two questions.

 

What is the brute damage cap?

 

What is the most that Fury can contribute to that cap?

[aethereal]

8 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Quick two questions.

 

What is the brute damage cap?

 

What is the most that Fury can contribute to that cap?

700% and theoretically 200%, but in practice more like 170-180%.

[Yomo Kimyata]

What if they changed the 200% to 300%?

 

[aethereal]

2 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

What if they changed the 200% to 300%?

 

Then it seems likely that scrappers and to a lesser extent Stalkers would be obsolete.

[Yomo Kimyata]

How about a slower ramp then?  People are complaining how hard it is to get to 100% fury, but it seems trivial to get to 80%.  If they raised the "fury cap" from 200 to 250 or 300, but made it harder to build, then wouldn't the existing ATO have good value?  I don't really have a horse in this fight.

[aethereal]

7 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

How about a slower ramp then?  People are complaining how hard it is to get to 100% fury, but it seems trivial to get to 80%.  If they raised the "fury cap" from 200 to 250 or 300, but made it harder to build, then wouldn't the existing ATO have good value?  I don't really have a horse in this fight.

 

Depends a lot on what exactly you mean by "a slower ramp."

 

If you mean, "for the first 30 seconds (1 minute?  2 minutes? 15 seconds?) of a mission a Brute is bad, and then after that they're better than a Scrapper until the next mission or until you faceplant," that doesn't sound like a great dynamic to me.

 

If you mean more just like "Brute damage fluctuates, Fury at its maximum reasonable value is great, but it's hard to get it to stay there, and at their peaks Brutes are better than Scrappers but it's impossible to be there all the time," then sure, I mean on some level I think that's what most of everyone wants.  My question is, how does that actually operationalize?  It seems to me like it's a really hard target to hit.  How do you prevent it from being the case that someone with a really careful build or disciplined playstyle doesn't just have a character who's better than a Scrapper in every way?  If you do make it so hard to get that even people with very careful builds and disciplined playstyles can't max Fury all the time, then does that mean that a basically competent Brute player is way below that baseline?  What exactly is the operational principle about how you do and don't max Fury?  I'm not expecting you to answer this with a detailed proposal, because I basically don't think that there are answers.

 

I think we could force fluctuations in Fury in various ways (there could be a random component to Fury gain/decay, or there could be a lockout after X period of time above Y Fury), but I don't think they'd "feel good."  The classic old-school good-feeling Brute experience was that you careened from one group to the next little or none of the pause that, at the time, was often the default playstyle of CoH, and which had tangible benefits.  The big thing to recognize is that that's no longer the default playstyle of CoH.  In a group now or at well-built, relatively high-level solo play, everyone careens from group to group.  There's little sense that you need to let your health or endurance meter recover between fights.  So the old-style Fury play, where you were pushing your luck on your health and endurance meters in order to maintain your fury meter, is pretty fundamentally broken.  I think that now even in very challenging content, the dynamic is not usually pauses after every group.

[aethereal]

Quick stylized math:  Take a power that does 100 damage at scale 1:

 

95% damage slotting

+30% damage from Alpha Slot

Normal crits (ie, 10% against LTs+, doubles the damage of the power)

 

Scrapper Damage:

Non-crit damage: 112.5 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3) = 253.125 damage

Crit damage:  225 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3) = 506.25 damage

 

Brutes today:

(So that means 85 Fury for 170% damage bonus):

Damage:  75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 1.7) = 296.25 damage

 

So what's the crit rate that Scrappers need to have in order to exceed Brute damage?

296.25 < (1 - x) * 253.125 + x * 502.25

296.25 < 253.125 - 253.125x + 502.25x

296.25 < 253.125 + 253.125x

43.125 < 253.125x

x > 17.037%

 

So Scrappers need to have a better effective crit rate than 17% to outdamage Brutes.  A normal power, against LTs and higher, does 16% with the ATO1.  ATO2 then has very different results on different Scrappers (and I do think that people overestimate how likely it is that you can get "high end Scrapper pylon times performance with ATO2" in ordinary play), but especially in well-build cases gives Scrappers a substantial damage advantage by raising effective crit rate to potentially 40%+

 

Brutes who could max out Fury:

(Let's say you could get 100 Fury instead of basically being capped at 85)

Damage:  75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 2) = 318.75

 

The quicker version of the inequality above is:

(Brute damage - Scrapper non-crit damage) / (Scrapper non-crit damage) = Crit Rate for equality

(318.75 - 253.125) / 253.125 = 25.93% effective crit rate needed for Scrappers to hit Brute damage

 

Brute who could get to 250% damage bonus from Fury:

Damage: 75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 2.5) = 356.25

Crit rate needed for equality: 40.74%

 

Brute who could get to 300% damage bonus from Fury:

Damage:  75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 3) = 393.75

Crit rate needed for equality:  55.56%

 

 

Some notes on the analysis above:

 

1.  This is the crit rate needed for Scrappers to equal Brutes.  Scrappers need to have a damage advantage over Brutes, because they're defensively inferior.  So you need to look at getting a crit rate higher than that by whatever you think the appropriate damage differential is.

 

2.  This analysis is necessarily incomplete.  It ignores Build Up, which is massively better for Scrappers than it is for Brutes, for example.  It ignores damage procs, which are significantly better for Brutes than they are for Scrappers.  It ignores non-critting damage like Savage or Fire DoTs, and damage auras, which are an advantage for Brutes.  It ignores Scrappers powers that have a >10% chance to crit (of which there are a reasonably high number), and are obviously an advantage for Scrappers.  It ignores powers that don't have "full crits" and do less than 2x damage when they crit (of which there are also a reasonably high number).  Etc. etc.  It's not the last word on anything, but it does touch on the broad, most common cases when comparing Brute and Scrapper damage.

 

3.  Because of ATO2, it's not trivial to calculate what the effective crit rate of Scrappers is.  Here's a veeeery rough approximation:  Let's say that you activate a power on average of every 1.5 seconds.  That means that you can do 40 powers per minute.  Superior ATO2 Proc has 4 PPM.  Let's say you get 10 activations per minute (because of global recharge).  Let's say that every time it activates, you can fit two powers in its activation window.  So you have 20 powers that are affected by ATO2, and 20 that are not.  Powers that are affected by ATO2 have a 66% crit rate, powers that are not have a 16% crit rate, your total effective crit rate is 41%.  This obviously assumes a level 50, perma-hasten Scrapper.  The real highest-end scrappers prioritize their high-damage powers into the activation window of their crit proc, and potentially get three activations per crit window, and maybe get more than 10 activations per minute, for a yet-higher effective crit rate.  But that's not necessarily possible for all sets, and assumes machine-gun-style power activations with no repositioning, etc.

Edited January 13, 2023 by aethereal

[Neiska]

I cannot claim to be an expert on the matter, but don't some powersets still shine better on one AT vs another? As an example I have made both a Bio Armor/Savage Tanker and Brute, and that seems to perform far better on the brute, with barely noticeable differences in durability.

 

I mean, there is many more sides to this to my mind. But tankers definitely favor target-saturation situations, where brutes seem to perform equally in most situations, so long as you are pushing that rage bar/playing at a fast pace. There are exceptions of course. But I do wonder what a full comparison of all melees might reveal as well, not just Tankers vs Brutes, or Brutes vs Scrappers, but a Tanker vs Brute vs Scrapper vs Stalker 4 vs 4 comparison.

 

I would expect each would shine differently in different situations, even more so with different melee power/armor powersets. And I would be fine with that, as I expect many people would. Each having their own niche is more or less its own kind of balance.

 

But back on topic. Were brutes over-nerfed? No, I don't think so. They can still do the things they could do before. Ranking them against tankers is a bit of an apples to oranges to my mind though, given the differences in target caps and the like. Instead of having a comparison of AT vs AT, a comparison of AT vs activity be revealing as well. I would still bet that Brutes beat Tankers on farm maps as an example. (not that I am arguing that should be used as a metric for comparison, only illustrating context.)

 

TLDR - In order to have a true measurement, you would have to compare more than just AT vs AT, but a comparison of armor and melee sets as well, as well as different activities, which is far more than an X vs Y comparison.

 

Personally I still think both are in a good place. I still remember a time before the tanker change where there were so few tankers being played that fully gearing one up was actually quite cheap to do.

 

Just my musings and opinion on the matter. 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Neiska

[tidge]

I think folks ignore the analysis offered by @Krimson at their peril. I am generally seeing people back into comfortable(?) corners that are, from my PoV, indistinguishable from "somebody is doing something better than me, something needs to be done about that!"

 

Even ignoring the variability from choices of primaries and secondaries, and the variability of power picks from those, and the variability of enhancement slotting options, the game offers beaucoup different types of "pummel AI-controlled spawns into pixels". I get the sense that folks are focused on some specific types of content while not considering all the other types of content the game offers, across a wide-variety of player levels. I appreciate that @Krimson explicitly called out fighting GMs with a Tanker, and all the extra effort that has to go into such an activity for a Tanker.  Folks complaining about Tanker AoEs are essentially complaining about Tankers defeating minion-level scrubs. Is there more to the complaints than this?

[roleki]

At this point, having Fury go over 85% would ruin my immersion, as I manifest that last 15% physiologically.

[Gobbledigook]

What if they changed the ATO proc to giving a flat increase to Fury cap by 15/25 with superior and let Fury rise above 85 consistently.

 

But increasing Fury may not be the best option as the Brute would not benefit from outside damage buffs as much as other AT's. So maybe a very small increase to base damage scalar .75>.8 even to .85 scale could be a better option? Looking at the math it does not seem too much of a buff.

 

Hopefully a small buff like that would not step on Scrappers toes too much. Also Tankers could live in peace lol.

Edited January 14, 2023 by Gobbledegook

[Luminara]

 

I linked a post with these screenshots halfway up this page.  Don't know why the rest of your are struggling, but I don't have any trouble hitting 100% and maintaining it.

[Gobbledigook]

6 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

I linked a post with these screenshots halfway up this page.  Don't know why the rest of your are struggling, but I don't have any trouble hitting 100% and maintaining it.

I think it is when they are on a single target rather than surrounded by enemies.